


adam and eve and the apple tore eden apart

by jonphaedrus



Category: Neon Genesis Evangelion
Genre: Character Study, Dysfunctional Relationships, Extended Metaphors, F/M, Gratuitous Hebrew, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Non-Sexual Intimacy, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, lies and the lying liars who tell them
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-07
Updated: 2020-07-07
Packaged: 2021-03-05 04:55:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,407
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25128862
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jonphaedrus/pseuds/jonphaedrus
Summary: You can’t start a fire without a spark.
Relationships: Fuyutsuki Kouzou/Ikari Gendou, Fuyutsuki Kouzou/Ikari Yui/Ikari Gendou, Ikari Gendou/Ikari Yui, Other Relationship(s) Mentioned
Comments: 13
Kudos: 24





	adam and eve and the apple tore eden apart

**Author's Note:**

> sometimes you're like "i want fanfic for this specific ship and if i have to feed myself i will" and then you don't make any of the things you planned to and make something else and then you eat eat it and give yourself food poisoning.
> 
> title from ["good 'n evil" from the broadway jekyll & hyde](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eropdxA_hj0)

The doorknob turns, the latch disengages with a whisper, and the door opens.

“I’m home.”

The hinges creak shut, the deadbolt shunts closed, shoes are set onto the hardwood floor. Footsteps from the front hall, even-paced, flat-footed. Heavy. He always walks with such _finality_ , practically stomping.

Kōzō doesn’t look up from what he’s reading, turns the page, and waits. The footsteps stop in the doorway to the kitchen, and the silence that sits on both of them is momentarily oppressive. It hangs, draws thin and tight, and then goes so long it lapses. Rather than say anything else, the footsteps skirt the edge of his vision as he turns the page, marks his initials at the bottom, and keeps reading.

The electric kettle boils. The air conditioning hisses, chugging along as an omnipresent, white-noise whine, mercifully drowning out the distant cicada drone. He’s grown inured to this, too, after fifteen years. Just one of a thousand cuts.

The kettle clicks off, water bubbling loudly. The gurgle of a filling mug, the metallic clink of a spoon. The fridge opens and shuts, a container seal pops open, a drawer slides out along its casters and chopsticks click and rattle. The drawer clunks when it shuts, silverware clattering against the plastic holder.

Gendō sits down. There’s no play at politeness, no feigned _itadakimasu_ to thank him for the leftovers. He just eats, watches Kōzō turn the page, initial. Turn the page, initial. Gendō’s chopsticks click against the glass container. The steam from his hot tea makes the air above the table humid for the briefest moment every time he takes a sip.

Gendō sets down his chopsticks with a _tack_. “And here I thought the light was on because someone was home. It seems Commander Fuyutsuki decided to stay late again.”

“Gendō.”

He doesn’t look up when he says it; it’s not a question. It’s a statement and an indictment all its own. The other man starts to draw himself up, his jaw squaring, the hand that Kōzō can see on the table clenching into a fist. For a moment, there’s the metallic sensation of adrenaline before a fight.

And then Gendō stops, because he has no ground to stand on. His hand relaxes. He settles more into the chair.

It goes quiet but for the hum of the air conditioner, the whisper of Kōzō turning pages, and the sound of Gendō’s cup as he picks it up, sets it down. A train runs past outside, rattling the rails and the windows onto the porch.

“I’m surprised you came back tonight.” Kōzō doesn’t look up as he says it. It doesn’t come out with any malice, studied neutrality. It’s far from an indictment. It’s a statement, a presentation of facts. Kōzō _didn’t_ expect him to come back tonight. Gendō had left unusually early for a chronic over-worker, just barely not conspicuous as he followed Dr. Akagi out to her car.

Gendō’s laugh is a soft huff of breath, nothing more. His glasses click as he takes them off, sets them on the table. “Apparently I make it difficult to work. Dr. Akagi threw me out.”

“You do make it difficult to work,” Kōzō agrees. He signs off on the last page and passes the report across the table, hands Gendō his pen. There’s no point in waiting for formalities at the office in the morning: Gendō takes his pen and signs off, passes it back. Kōzo squares off the stack and sets them aside, takes out the next folder. Budget allocations paperwork.

It’s late.

He starts in on it anyway.

“You seem to be working just fine despite my distractions, Professor.” Kōzō can hear a cocky note in Gendō’s voice, one that makes his hackles raise, as if there's a joke he's not privy to. Squaring for a fight. Always squaring for a fight.

“I’m more used to you than Dr. Akagi is. I know how to ignore you.” He continues to do so: he isn’t rising to the bait, not tonight. Kōzō just doesn’t have the energy. He’s spent over a decade as one of many satellites orbiting in the vicinity of Gendō Ikari's great moon, and he’s past the point of letting every new shift change the angle and the axis of his elliptical. Trying to see through the metaphorical cloud layer is impossible. There’s no point in an uphill battle you can’t win.

“Are you going to bed soon?”

He had been planning on it. Kōzō had _wanted_ to go to bed an hour ago, but there had been a stubborn part of him that had sat up anyway, burning midnight oil to try and get ahead on literally _anything_ —paperwork, unfinished memos to local community leaders, Gendō.

“Maybe.”

Gendō Ikari isn’t the sort of person who would let anyone hear or see thinking. Instead over time Kōzō has learned to _feel_ it, a certain electric charge in the air around him, as if his mind is winding up, kinetic energy piling on as the starter plugs connect and the engine turns over. He’s thinking now: preternaturally still, silent, focused on something simultaneously far away and yet right at hand, mired in the paradoxes that fill his mind to bursting.

“The hedgehog’s dilemma,” he says.

Kōzō sets down his pen.

“Who’s the hedgehog,” he replies, not really asking a question. “You?” Gendō Ikari has made a career out of sharing people's beds and nothing else. Kōzō has never met anyone else with such a great capacity to care about the world while simultaneously being completely unable to reveal how much he cares for those around him. Without Yui, it's only gotten worse.

It’s almost enough to be a super power: Gendō Ikari, the absolute worst father of the year.

“Me,” Gendō agrees.

Kōzō looks up at him at last, and the first thought he has is _you look tired_. Without his glasses, Gendō’s eyes are sunken and hollow, squinting against the light, the old incandescent bulbs that Kōzō still insists on using because they free up the grid making his hair look thinner, his face sallower. He’s not been eating; he’s lost weight, his skin loose and papery around his throat, vulnerable without his uniform jacket. He looks almost older than Kōzō does, his only saving grace that his hair hasn’t started to grey. He needs to trim his beard.

Gendō has a way of looking sharper at the edges than everyone else. The sharpness, as if he's the only thing in focus in a diffuse world.

“You,” Kōzō repeats, and this is new. This is not Commander Gendō Ikari, whose entire emotional spectrum hits _angry, horny,_ and, depending on the day of the week, _hubris_.

This is Yui’s Gendō Ikari, who has been disappearing more and more since her death, growing thinner, like paper held up to too-bright a light.

“Me.” Gendō still doesn’t look at him. He drums his fingers on the tabletop. “Sitting here in my nest of quills, inviting people closer just to see how deeply I can stab them. An ethical paradox: who is willing to accept the warmth I can offer, even knowing that to do so will inevitably destroy them? There are three types.” He holds up his fingers. “One: that person who finds love for the sake of love itself worthy of suffering. Two: masochists. Three: that person which knows what a quill is and has learned to lay between them.”

Kōzō waits, but there’s nothing more forthcoming. Gendō doesn’t seem likely to finish explaining himself. Not that he ever is.

“And?” He finally gives in to temptation. The endless, endless temptation that is Gendō Ikari’s brain, a puzzle-box that he can pick and never find anything but more puzzles, secrets wrapped in allusions, metaphors inside paradoxes, dilemmas whose shredded ethics have been replaced by a symbolic shroud for which he doesn’t have the key. In Gendō Ikari’s brain, sign and signifier break down. Make of that what you will.

“Which are you, Fuyutsuki?” Gendō looks at him at last, smirks, cocks one eyebrow. “One, two, or three?”

Kōzō holds his stare, and then abruptly gets up, shuts the folder he’s working on.

“Goodnight, Ikari.”

Yui loved for the sake of love itself, of course. It was her fatal flaw. She had seen straight through Gendō, seen straight through the entirety of the world around her, and known with the kind of soul-deep surety that there was no way forward but through hellfire and the exposure of that which lurked beneath. Once upon a time, her presence in their lives had been the center of their gravity, Gendō tidally locked as a satellite in her orbit. That intense, punishing closeness at the tip of the elipsis had finally torn them apart, gravity wrenching into an equal and opposite reaction, left a greater moon circling the ghost where once spun a planet that had thought better of stability.

The Akagis are masochists. How could they not be? Inexorable, inescapable pressure draws them closer and closer, a desire for the knowledge beneath the cloud layer, a focus inward rather than outward. There’s only one way down, and the atmosphere will crush them both.

Kōzō Fuyutsuki exists at the margins.

His orbit is stable, distant but present. He revolves, an endless, looping rhythm. He never gets too close, but never goes too far, shepherding lost satellites as close to safety as he can, passes between the spines, and waits.

Watching.

“Fuyutsuki.” In the dark, Gendō’s whisper sounds louder than it is, like thunder rumbling. Kōzō grunts to let the other man know he’s awake, but doesn’t roll over. It’s too early to move. “There’s another post-operation press release tonight. I need you to go.”

“Fine.” It’s his job, after all, or something like it. The better half of NERV high command.

The door to his room shuts, and he dozes back off before he hears Gendō’s footsteps leave. By the time he’s awake a half-hour later, the other man is gone, his dishes left in the sink.

This, too, Kōzō must clean up.

He hardly sees Gendō all day; it’s like catching smoke in his hands. He drifts out of rooms whenever Kōzō walks in, leaves a half-finished lunch forgotten on his desk. His paperwork shows up in Kōzō’s inbox along with an apologetic gopher, promises to finish unfinished work that _someone_ has to do.

The train ride home is long, slow, and quiet. Kōzō looks out over the Geofront and thinks about making curry, thinks about reading his unfinished morning newspaper. He thinks about the snow, and the way that winter used to smell crisp and bitter on the back of his tongue.

It’s raining outside. Kōzō didn’t bring an umbrella.

The ennui of the council meeting isn’t any better soaking wet, either. At least the discomfort of slowly-drying socks dripping into his soggy shoes is a distraction to keep him awake in the interminable droning on that is any council meeting.

The rain doesn’t let up as he takes the train home, and for the final sprint from the station to the apartment, Kōzō unfolds his newspaper and holds it over his head, squinting against the raindrops. This is why he always preferred snow: snow doesn’t soak straight through to your skin; snow doesn’t pound down on you with relentless pressure. Rain is an inescapable deluge.

It soaks his newspaper, too. When Kōzō gets home, he lays it out over the recycling bin in the front hall to dry, and—for once—takes the elevator instead of the stairs, his knees aching from running in the rain. He unlocks the front door, sets his bag down, bends over to take off his shoes, and only _then_ does he realize the lights are on.

“I’m home,” he says.

“Professor,” Gendō replies, and Kōzō looks up, his shoes in his hand, to find the other man standing in the doorway to the kitchen. He sets his shoes down. His toes squelch in his wet socks. There’s a window open somewhere, and the rain pounds down in staccato bursts. Wind slaps it against the walls of the apartment building. It’s a drumbeat, rolling in time with the rough pounding of his heart.

“What,” Kōzō replies, straightening just as Gendō takes him by the elbows and kisses him. Kōzō’s back hits the closed door, he’s got one hand fisted in the fabric at the front of Gendō’s shirt—either pulling him closer or pushing him away, he’s not sure.

Even in a stable orbit, there are still eclipses.

Gendō Ikari kisses the same way that Gendō Rokubungi kissed: like he’s afraid to breathe. If he breathes, inhales, the spell will break, and the tidal force will shatter one or the both of them. He kisses like he’s terrified. He kisses like he’s choking.

Every kiss is a hand on the leash, pulling tighter, and if Gendō looks too close, the leash will choke him. The leash will snap.

“Please,” Gendō whispers.

Kōzō tangles a hand in Gendō’s hair, and breathes for him.

Afterward, out of breath and riding hazy euphoria, Kōzō stares up at the familiar ceiling of his bedroom and listens to the rain. The window by his bed is cracked and the smell of petrichor muffles the smells of sweat and sex, cool mist spraying in beneath the building overhang. Gendō sprawls half on him, half facedown on the bed, staring silently out the window.

How many years, now, have they spent in shared silence?

Kōzō drags his hand down his face, and grimaces when he realizes he’s just made even more of a mess of himself. “I’m going to take a bath.” Gendō grunts and doesn’t otherwise move. He’s taller than Kōzō is, albeit not by much, and practically skin and bones, but he’s still heavy.

Gendō follows him, as if he has nothing better to do. For all Kōzō knows, he might not. It’s not like he does any of the paperwork for NERV: that is solely Kōzō and Misato’s domain. They bathe in silence, and the steam eases the ache in Kōzō’s knees and back, wearing down the tension from the day, the bone-deep throb that always accompanies what he still can’t stop thinking of as summer cloudbursts.

It’s hard to remember the passage of time in the bath. Minutes run away, slipping together without a way to watch the clock, and Kōzō has been known to lose hours refilling the tub. Gendō is never one to relax that much, to lose time when he could be focused, but even he falls to introspection.

Tonight, curled with his knees underwater, Gendō leaning against the side of the tub, Kōzō thinks about getting older. If SEELE hadn’t triggered Second Impact, he would be retiring in less than a year.

His hairline is receding, his back aches at the end of over-long days. He probably needs reading glasses, not that he’s ever going to go out of his way to get them. They’re too close to the end, now. What would be the point?

In the steam, Gendō rubs at his burned palms, his short nails scratching over the welts. It’s a form of intimacy, Kōzō supposes. From this angle, he can see where Gendō’s hair is beginning to thin, the lines forming at his brow from how much he frowns.

“I can feel you thinking.”

Gendō leans further back, tilts his head over the side of the tub until some of his hair falls into the water, stares up at the ceiling. Even now, his face soft post-coital and flushed with heat from the steam, he looks old and sick and sorry. “The tetrapod,” he says at last, still idly scratching at his palms. He stretches his long legs out until his feet bump the opposite wall. “The uniqueness of each Angel could make you believe they have nothing in common aside from their biological desires, but are we Lilin any different? What is an amino acid to a human being? Thus, I consider the tetrapod.”

Kōzō settles back in the water, laces his fingers together as he thinks. “Was the soul born with intellect? Or was the soul innate to the very first being that grew in the LCL sea? Kami are not necessarily born from the self-aware mind, but Christianity firmly believes there is no such thing as the soul of a dog, even though their argument is based on where Genesis itself says ולכל–חית הארץ ולכל עוף השׁמים ולכל רומשׂ על–הארץ, אשר–בּו נפשׁ חיה, את–כּל–ירק עשב, לאכלה; ויהי–הן.”

Gendō sighs, quietly, in the put-upon way of a tired student. “I don’t have my textbook open in front of me, Professor. Care to translate for the class?”

“'And to every beast of the earth, every fowl of the air, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth wherein there is a living soul, I have given unto all of them every green herb for food. And it was so.'”

“ _Nepesh-chay_ ,” Gendō murmurs. His accent is terrible, and it’s endearing how bad it is despite all his years of practice. “The breath of life. Where do the Lilin begin? Was it with modern man, or was it the tetrapod and its gills learning to breathe without a bath of LCL? Second Impact destroyed all Lilith-based life down to the microbial level. How ironic to both begin and end at Antarctica.”

Kōzō struggles to make the connection. “Antarctica?”

“SEELE has located the Lance.” Kōzō closes his eyes and sinks further under the water. It was only a matter of time, he supposes. “We’re leaving in two days.” Of course it’s _we_. Even though Kōzō by all rights should stay in Japan to keep up the illusion of a Chain of Command, of course they will both go to Antarctica. Everything began and ended there. Everything _will_ begin and end there.

Gendō continues: “Adam creates Angels. First Impact destroys both Adam and his Angels. Lilith creates man, man resurrects Adam, Adam destroys man, Adam creates Angels. The tetrapods crawled first onto Antarctica, and it is upon Antarctica that we sealed our own destruction.”

Kōzō, smiling to himself, adds, “Man eats Adam, creates EVA. EVA inherits the earth.”

There’s a long silence, broken only by Kōzō’s own quiet laughter. Gendō slowly rolls his head sideways and cracks one eye open to glare at him. It’s a withering look of disappointment. “Really,” he says at last.

“I know for a _fact_ that you’ve seen Jurassic Park.” Yui had made a big fuss over it when she found out that Gendō hadn’t, and had ended up borrowing Kōzō’s copy to watch it with him.

Gendō laughs, a hoarse chuckle under his breath, and Kōzō Fuyutsuki thinks of an overexcited young man in the faculty lounge ranting about the impossibility of dinosaur cloning, the soul of a god implanted in the mirror of a dead girl, of Yui’s limp clothes soaked in the breath of life. He thinks of Gendō crying when he thought nobody could hear, and he thinks of the buzz of cicadas beneath the boughs of a tree, the drone interspersed with the hiccoughing laughs of a child.

The rings of Saturn were not formed by any single concussive shot, no impact but for an accreting disk. Dust and gas, ice and rock, gathered up over millennia, tugged by inexorable gravity and maintained by dozens of tiny guiding moons, skimming the surface and setting them once more upon their route. The system is maintained, the orbits are secure, and the rings spin on, stable.

They orbit each other, now, as if their own gravity can replace what they lost without Yui, as if a greater moon like Gendō can create tidal pressure and weather patterns, can influence the axis of existence, as if a lesser moon like Kōzō can do any more than correct the angle of the rings, can smooth their curve and shepherd on the hope for a brighter future.

But the ceiling is familiar, as is the man who wakes more often than not in his bed, and the evil is familiar, too. It came on casually, but it has killed them all just the same. Poison taken one drop at a time is still poison, and Gendō and Kōzō are surely two men who have drunk their fair share: a dependable, inevitable death.

[ You can’t start a fire without a spark. ](https://i.imgur.com/2fXTh6s.png)


End file.
